JEDI SEIZE: SEIZE THE MEANS OF RETRIEVAL
Website: jedi.inertial.science/seize/
Our proposal for a new initiative aiming to build a community of researchers and practitioners interested in realizing public information access platforms has been accepted for SIGIR Futures (sigir.org/futures/). 🎉🎉🎉
![Screenshot of slide titled "Praxis" with the subtext "liberatory research + liberatory action". On the right there's a list of items as follows:
Building consensus on red lines in our research, e.g., prohibiting IR research on generative ads and other related technologies whose core objective is to manipulate public opinion at scale.
2. Building counter-structures, e.g., building public-service IR platforms as alternatives to for-profit proprietary systems, exploring worker-owned cooperatives as alternatives to for-profit corporations, and building alternatives to the for-profit academic publishing ecosystem.
3. Collective organizing and movement building, e.g., building collectives within the research community, organizing issue-based protests, supporting labor unionization within academic and industry institutions, and participating in broader political movements and collective actions.
4. Sociopolitical consciousness raising within the research community, e.g., creating spaces where IR community members can engage in critical dialog as a form of liberatory pedagogy [Freire, 1970], initiating book clubs and reading groups to engage with critical scholarship and build shared understanding, and leveraging different artistic medium like zines to educate and mobilize the community.
5. Public education, e.g., creating materials and resources that inform and mobilize civil society against oppressive actors who instrumentalize new technologies to entrench their wealth and power and reinforce historical systems of oppression.
6. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, e.g., ensuring that our communities are welcoming and safe spaces for researchers and practitioners from historically underrepresented and marginalized groups and their radical liberatory politics, and actively countering systemic discrimination and marginalization in our community spaces.
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![Screenshot of slide with the quotes:
"Critical theory […] struggles for a classless, nondominative, co-operative, participatory democracy."
"Critical information theory […] must study not just the role of information and information concepts in society, academia, nature, culture, etc, but how it is related to processes of oppression, exploitation, and domination, which implies a normative judgment in solidarity with the dominated and for the abolishment of domination."](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:efdy25fga2sl46ig2jkp7qa6/bafkreibts7qywfir3uuyebgg2egjopn5whz2pivq4dgiqvzuaepadbjpzq)
![Screenshot of slide with the following text (in table form):
**The two frames of IR & Society**
[Goals]
Liberal frame: Desired system attributes, e.g., fairness, confidentiality, transparency, and sustainability.
Critical frame: Desired societal outcomes, e.g., social justice, emancipation, and democracy.
[Methods and practices]
Liberal frame: Algorithmic harm mitigation, e.g., fair ranking, fact-checking, privacy mechanisms, transparency, and explainability.
Critical frame: Sociotechnical mitigation, repair, refusal, building countertechnologies; foregrounds praxis and movement building.
[Values, politics, and epistemologies]
Liberal frame: Sometimes (mis-)represented as apolitical; politically espouses individual rights, equality, freedom of speech, and market economies; philosophically positivist and tied to technological and instrumental rationality.
Critical frame: Explicitly political and politically decolonial, anti-racist, feminist, queer, pro-labor, anti-capitalist, anti-casteist, anti-ableist, and abolitionist; philosophically social constructionist and principally nondominative.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:efdy25fga2sl46ig2jkp7qa6/bafkreia2x43pyjuf5665qihq4anp66wrjb5puqsndjmmgcxmogpx3qbm74)
